Turkey Trot, Mad Gobbler Dash planned Saturday

Friday

Nov 16, 2012 at 12:00 PMNov 16, 2012 at 12:02 PM

Cynthia Grau

The 3rd annual Turkey Trot will be taking off Saturday morning at the Boys and Girls Club of Livingston County, located at 1303 E. Indiana Ave., and Gary Beckman, executive director of the organization, says the event has added a few new points of interest to its schedule.“We’re changing the starting point. We used to start in the parking lot and now we’re starting to the east of the club on Indiana Avenue. The route is still the same after that. We’ve added a quarter mile child mad dash. We’ll call them Little Gobblers. We haven’t done that in the past. We still have the 3K walk on top of everything. We also have booths this year, including a massage therapy booth,” Beckman said. “We tried to make it more of a health fair at the same time. It’s our first year trying that and we have a few coming out for it and hopefully next year we can get on their schedule a little earlier and they can plan to come out and make this a little more overall fun event for everyone.”As of Thursday morning, between 70 and 75 runners and walkers had registered, though Beckman does expect more come Saturday.“We typically have several that come in and sign up because they wanted to wait until the last minute to see what the weather’s going to be like,” he said.The money raised from this event gets put back into the Boys and Girls Club of Livingston County, which serves, on average, 150 children a day in its after school program.Beckman says that he really hopes the event takes off and continues to grow, as it has in the past few years.“We want to make it fun, we want to make it safe and enjoyable for the participants so hopefully it continues to grow and becomes a big event that people want to participate in,” he said.Sponsors for the event include Maurices, First Financial Bank, BDI Plumbing, Joan Bullard Realty, Tibbs Construction, Bank of Pontiac, Country Financial-Marlon Eilts, Kristy’s Tranquility Massage, Lyons-Sullivan Realty, American Legion, Streator Onized Credit Union, Netsource Solutions, The General Store, State Bank of Graymont, Durham Electric, Pontiac Family Kitchen and Livingston County Chiropractic.“We couldn’t do it without the participants and it wouldn’t be nearly as fun without our sponsors and without the community donating prizes for our raffle and our registration bags. Collectively, the whole town has stepped up and made this event what it is and we certainly appreciate it,” Beckman said.